I was lucky enough to go on holiday a couple of weeks ago, and one of my essentials to buy before we left was a decent-sized memory card. If you've read any of my other reviews in this line, you'll know I've accrued a small stack of memory cards over the years, but they are all of small capacities and don't even have a class listed on them, so it was time to go for something bigger.

Initially I was looking at 16GB and 32GB cards, but I eventually decided to go for two 8GB cards; the advantage being that if one failed, I'd still have the other one. I could also get cards of different classes and keep one for photo and the other for video. It was also cheaper to buy two 8GB cards of different classes than one 16GB card.

I bought this card from Amazon, where it currently retails at just over £10 with free delivery. The class 4 speed is adequate, despite the fact that a minimum of class 6 is recommended by users of my camera (a Panasonic Lumix TZ7). As I didn't plan to record much HD video, I decided that class 4 would be fine for my needs.

The memory card is a typical size and has a pinkish image on the front along with the brand name (Kingston), the capacity (8GB) and the class (4). It slotted into my camera as easily as any other card, and then I was ready to start taking pictures. Obviously, the number of pictures it can store depends on the resolution, quality and so on, but on the highest quality setting of my 10.1 megapixel camera, I managed to get over 1,100 photos and probably about 30 minutes of HD video - with enough room to spare to take pictures around London and of an awards ceremony as well. If you're working with lower resolutions you might even be able to double that.

Although this memory card can be used with card readers, I prefer to leave it in my camera to transfer images and video to my computer. I have to say that my computer struggled where the memory card didn't in dealing with all these photos and videos; however, this is more to do with my hard drive capacity and the camera software. As I rarely take this number of photos in one go then it doesn't bother me too much that they took a while to process, but if you're taking a thousand photos or long periods of video on a regular basis, you might want to opt for a class 6+ card. As I mentioned previously, class 6 is recommended for shooting any HD video using this camera although I have found class 4 to be fine.

I haven't had this memory card for long enough to comment on durability over time, but it seems well-made and on its outings so far (Crete, Croatia, Italy, Corfu, Greece and London) it's performed extremely well and I couldn't ask for more. I would thoroughly recommend buying this card online as it's a great price and a good investment.